Doing More With Less: Short Videogame Design. Rapid advances in computing, design community discourse, and demographic variation continues to make game development and distribution easier each year, prompting a tidal wave of new games. Although console manufacturers historically limited the number of annual releases, the internet and smartphone app spaces have no such restrictions. Videogames used to be light on content due to limitations of technology. Then they ran into limitations of budget. The latest and increasingly dominant limitation now seems to be consumer time and attention within an ecosystem of constantly improving free/cheap entertainment alternatives. Not only is each game competing with the flood of other quality games, either – it also battles for attention against the internet in general and pirated media. Justifiable time and cost, for both developers and consumers, are on the way down.
This has prompted unexpected moves like GameStop purchasing Kongregate, and Electronic Arts buying Playfish. Toy Without Objective. Are there any good articles on the history and trends of text based games? : gamedev. The guide to implementing 2D platformers | Higher-Order Fun. Having previously been disappointed by the information available on the topic, this is my attempt at categorizing different ways to implement 2D platform games, list their strengths and weaknesses, and discuss some implementation details.
The long-term goal is to make this an exhaustive and comprehensible guide to the implementation of 2D platform games. If you have any sort of feedback, correction, request, or addition – please leave it in the comments! Disclaimer: some of the information presented here comes from reverse engineering the behavior of the game, not from its code or programmers. It’s possible that they are not ACTUALLY implemented in this way, and merely behave in an equivalent way. Also note that tile sizes are for the game logic, graphical tiles might be of a different size. I can think of four major ways in which a platform game can be implemented. Type #1: Tile-based (pure) Character movement is limited to tiles, so you can never stand halfway between two tiles. Slopes.
Sprites. Online convert TIFF, JPG, EPS, PCX, PDF, PNG, PSD, SVG, TGA etc. Forums. Boss Battles are Broken « Jon Shafer on Design. I’m hopping off of strategy gaming for one more article in order to talk about a problem that’s prevalent in RPGs, my other favorite genre. Namely: bosses. Okay, so maybe saying all boss battles are “broken” is a bit of a stretch. But for the most part you could say they’re… misused. This really shouldn’t be much of a surprise, as the model for boss fights that you find in most RPGs has evolved little since its crude introduction in the 1980s. At the end of every major level you’ll run into a monster just like all the others, except it has 5 times more health and does 5 times more damage with each attack. Maybe they have a special weakness, or a particularly devastating attack that you have to figure out.
More troubling still, even if the fights themselves were interesting, the fact that they exist at all hurts the overall experience of the game. Strategy… or Pattern-Matching? Nearly every RPG boss fight completely lacks this strategic element. Bad Behavior Discovery - Jon. Bouncy Mouse. Introduction After publishing Bouncy Mouse on iOS and Android at the end of last year, I learned a few very important lessons. Key among them was that breaking into an established market is hard. On the thoroughly saturated iPhone market, gaining traction was very hard; on the less saturated Android Marketplace, progress was easier, but still not easy. Given this experience, I saw an interesting opportunity on the Chrome Web Store. While the Web Store is by no means empty, its catalogue of high-quality HTML5-based games is just beginning to grow into maturity. In this case study, I will talk a bit about the general process of porting Bouncy Mouse to HTML5, then I will dig a bit deeper into three areas that proved interesting: Audio, Performance, and Monetization.
Porting a C++ Game To HTML5 Bouncy Mouse is currently available on Android(C++), iOS (C++), Windows Phone 7 (C#), and Chrome (Javascript). So now the question is, can anything be done to make a codebase easily hand-portable? Audio. Making a Speedy HTML5 Game - Desarrolladores de Facebook. This is a guest post by Sean Soria of Gamzee, a leader in HTML5 game development. In this post, he describes the potential of creating a city build using HTML5, as well as the trial and tribulations and how you can avoid them. Back when we started Gamzee, a lot of people in the game industry were down on HTML5. The hopeful ones said that HTML5 was the wave of the future, but it just wasn't stable or fast enough to make the big sort of 'Ville-type Flash games that dominate social gaming today.
So what did we do? We set out to make a big, isometric game in HTML5. And not only would it run on Facebook on desktop Web, but it would also run on mobile Web, utilizing Facebook Platform. On all iOS devices and Android phones. Pretty unambitious, right? In case you don't want to read the rest of this blog post, the results of all that work is here (apps.facebook.com/skyscrapercity). What We Learned Was it easy to make? What did we learn? You have to do a lot of experimentation Don't do stacking(!)
Resources - Game development Blogs. Games Blog. Welcome to the Wolfire Blog! This is where we keep everyone up to date on our progress on Overgrowth and other new stuff. Be sure to subscribe to get the latest news! Also, be sure to check out the forums for even more up to date news - or get on IRC for up to the second updates. By David Rosen on November 12th, 2013 Ever since we released Receiver, players have been asking us about supporting the Oculus Rift headset and the Razer Hydra controller.
The gun mechanics and exploration gameplay seemed like a natural fit for VR! We were planning to try it out at some point, but didn’t feel like we could take the time away from Overgrowth to work on it yet. Fortunately, since Receiver is open-source, another developer decided to implement it himself! If you have both the Oculus Rift and the Razer Hydra, here is the download link for the VR mod. When I was thinking of Hydra control schemes for Receiver, I never considered attaching one of the controllers to the player’s torso.
Slash Direction. Linear algebra for game developers ~ part 1. When I posted about decals last week, a number of readers commented that they would be interested in posts about linear algebra as it applies to game development. I decided if I'm going to write about that, I might as well start at the beginning! This will be review to many of you who have written games before or taken classes in kinematic physics, so please bear with me for this introductory post -- I will get to more advanced topics later. Why do we care about linear algebra? Linear algebra is the study of vectors. What is a vector? In games, vectors are used to store positions, directions, and velocities. The position vector indicates that the man is standing two meters east of the origin, and one meter north.
As you can see, a vector by itself is just a set of numbers -- it is only given meaning by its context. For this reason, it's important to keep track of your units. Now that we've gone over the basics of vectors, we need to know how to use them. Vector addition Vector subtraction. So You Want to Crowd-Source Your Funding? » devmag.org.za. With Double Fine adventures just hitting the $2,000,000 when I started writing this article; I seem to notice that the Internet, or at least the parts I pay attention to, is abuzz with ‘Kickstarter fever.’ Now I am extremely happy about this since: I love Double Fine, don’t like publishers, and feel this can be the start of something great. But, I must caution people against thinking that they can crowd source millions of dollars.
The reason I say this is because Double Fine has something unique. They have been around for 12 years, created one of the most celebrated cult hits, are making a game for a genre that is almost forgotten, and have two of the most famous people of that genre working on the game. Now that is a tall order to top! What do you need to crowd-source a million dollars? This is a question I don’t have an exact answer to, nor does anyone I would imagine. The next is Double Fine; I have already stated the company’s record. The Kickstarter Fever Learn from the indies.